Silent Hill Fans Are Way Too Picky

I love Silent Hill, I've been an enthusiastic fan ever since that first scurrying corpse (SH vets know which one) in the original. I finally got around to buying the HD collection on the 360, and I browsed the webs a little to see what was added and taken away. I found nothing but vile hatred and melancholy from SH fans about petty little changes and insignificant alterations. Guys, remember when we were little and had to have the Silent Hill vs Resident Evil argument everyday? Well, the fight is over, Silent Hill won by a landslide, so let's breathe, relax, and not pitch a fit every time Konami tweaks the original masterpieces.

Here's a list of complaints about the new HD collection which includes remastered versions of the underrated Silent Hill 2 and my favorite, the greatest old school survival horror game ever crafted, Silent Hill 3. Fans actually sat down, and wasted a couple minutes typing up dramatic hate messages about the following:

-characters tend to use new words when starting sentences, most often with Laura

-the distances on the sign at the beginning of Silent Hill 2 have been altered

-the textures on first aid kits and the medical cross posters have been changed

-the subtitles during Eddie's rant say "your" when they should say "you're"

-the video tape of Maria is bordered by a TV screen instead of being full screen

-when saving your game in Silent Hill 3 the screen is fade-to-white instead of the classic fade-to-red

-the mall music has punk music playing instead of the original's mall music (someone actually COMPLAINED about a lack of looping elevator style music!!!!)

-in the intro to Silent Hill 3 the famous cutscene of Valtiel dragging Heather Mason's corpse has been replaced by a cutscene of Heather trying to turn on her flashlight (perhaps the only legitimate complaint I found)

-Claudia says, "They've come to witness the beginning. The rebirth of Paradise, unspoiled by mankind". In the original SH3, she says "Despoiled"

-the sewer fairy says, "I have finally found a truly honest person", but years ago she said "I have finally found a truly honest man". Guys, seriously, they changed that because it was a mistake they made the first time around. The sewer fairy is talking about a girl, so why would they keep the obvious fuck-up of calling Heather a man in the game? Why is this a bad thing!!!???

-during the Leonard Wolf boss, you can sprint through the water with no impediment to your speed, as if it wasn't there

-when Heather pukes God, a larger puddle of blood has been added

These are real complaints posted on Konami's official message boards. This means that some entry level schmuck has to sit down and read through this nonsense. I hate to break it to my fellow Hillies, but Konami doesn't give a fuck about any of these "problems". Stop being so offended when your beloved games of old are altered, especially when the changes are so small and take nothing away from the experience. Do you not still have access to the originals? We need to stop pinpointing every subtle change we can find and then raging about it. Instead, let us focus on what's important, replaying two of the scariest fucking games ever made with new achievements that weren't there the first time around. 

There's A New Pokemon Red World Record!

The new Pokemon Red speed run record was set by a kid named Charlie Armitz, and above is the video of his amazing accomplishment. This is a world record set without glitches and finished in an eye-popping 1 hour and 50 minutes. I watch a lot of speed runs and world record attempts, but I don't usually post them to the blog due to their inaccessibility. However, this Pokemon Red record run is special. Charlie talks about his strategy for the entire video, going over why he picks Squirtle and why he needs a male Nidoran with a specific set of stats. Watching this video I learned that the Viridian Forest has certain tiles that don't produce random encounters ever, and that the Pokemon you had in your party when earning a badge get a secret permanent stat increase forever. It's accessible, and while you may not have 2 hours to watch someone else play an old version of Pokemon, I strongly encourage you to watch at least the first twenty minutes just to learn a couple of tricks that will change the way you play Pokemon games. It's proof that the gaming community is getting stronger and more talented, and that Pokemon means so much to so many. 

My First Loot Crate

Loot Crate is a subscription service that delivers a box of assorted nerd items based on a theme to your house monthly. It costs about 12$ a month, and the stuff inside is unknown to you until you open it, but the value of the collectibles is always more than what you're paying. I signed up last month, thinking it would be an awesome monthly event for me and Oliver. The crate came yesterday, and holy shit, it's better than I expected.

This month's theme is villains, and inside the loot crate was variant cover of Rocket Racoon #1, a documentary film about DC comic book villains, a Joker/Harley Quinn poster, a Bowser doing the Uncle Sam pose refrigerator magnet, Darth Vader keychain, Deadpool striped socks, and a t-shirt with Joker dressed as Loki. Watching Oliver open the box and freak the fuck out at the cool stuff inside makes this an easy 12$ to spend every month. 

Go to lootcrate.com, sign up, and enjoy the hugs your kids give you.

Hey Dalish, You Deserve It

My favorite thing to do in life is take video games too seriously, so to continue that tradition I want to talk about the Dalish. If you've played the Dragon Age games, then you're familiar with these nomadic elves. The Dalish are the descendants of a great elven society that was first forced into slavery by humans, then massacred by Templars soon after they were freed for not converting religions. The Dalish live in tribes, roaming around, never staying in one spot in an effort to close out the violent outside world and keep their fading traditions alive. The Dalish story is a sad one, but honestly, I feel like they are fucking asking for it at this point. 

It is an unpopular opinion, I know, but at least hear my reasons before deciding that I'm some virtual Ferelden republican. The Dalish tragedies happened centuries ago. Centuries ago. It's true that Ferelden hasn't advanced much technologically since then but it certainly has socially. The Dalish aren't just protecting themselves anymore, they are actively not participating in an evolving world. A Dalish keeper will point to those elves that do live in the cities, and use their squalor and poverty as an example as to why the Dalish avoid such a life, but this is short-sighted. As you play through either Dragon Age game, you'll come to realize that most Dalish clans are quite powerful, and their keepers intelligent and bright. Imagine what this strong of a group could do for the benefit of their people if they did decide to live in cities. The violence and elf-trafficking would certainly taper off with the presence of such a close-knit community inside city walls. The elves in these cities are persecuted because the elves that actually have the power to change things stay away.

Compare the Dalish to whoever you want (I heard Native Americans recently) but their ancient plight is no excuse to withdraw from a growing world.

“In time, the human empires will crumble. We have seen it happen countless times. Until then, we wait, we keep to the wild border lands, we raise halla and build aravels and present a moving target to the humans around us. We try to keep hold of the old ways, to relearn what was forgotten.” ―Gisharel, Keeper of the Ralaferin Clan

Not all humans act the same, and the same way that humans are racist towards elves, these Dalsih are just as bigoted by assuming modern humans will behave identically to those from hundreds of years ago. The Dalish puff up their chests and talk about how they are the only culture that hasn't "lost it's way" but their society is one based purely on aristocracy. Dalish keepers are the direct descendants of powerful families from ages ago. I don't respect birthrights. I respect democratic elections. The Dalish don't give a shit about their elven brothers who suffer in the cities, if they did, they'd help. They much prefer to use the example of them failing to further their own idealistic agenda. Look at the dwarves, who keep to their traditions (as flawed as they are) and also join the post-blight world, fully assimilating with the progress. Look at the Qunari, who are certainly treated differently by humans but still participate and are respected. A Dalish elf could hypothetically have been the hero of Ferelden (if that's what you chose) so it is possible to reverse what has happened and start building a better future for the Dalish people. But they'd rather stick their fucking noses in the air. 

Do this and feel no remorse.

Steph And I Talk About Our Kids' Future Abortions

This is an exact word for word account of a very unique conversation that my darling Stephanie and I had last night. Enjoy.

Her: So what happens when Phoebe gets pregnant at 16? What will you do?

Me: Well, if she tells me it was a huge mistake, and that having this baby so young will ruin her life and crush her dreams, then I'll drive her down to Planned Parenthood.

Her: And if Oliver gets some girl pregnant?

Me: That's more complicated, in that situation my child is the boy, so we would have to decide based on the young lady's decision. Of course though, if it was asked of me for whatever reason, yeah, same deal.

Her: What if it happens a 2nd time?

Me: My gut tells me to say tough shit, but in all honesty, I'd probably pay for another abortion after a very stern and disappointed lecture. However, once they reach 18, if these kids are still too dense to practice safe sex, then they are just going to have to deal with it. I'm not driving my 24 year old to the baby killer every other month.

Her: Yes you would, if that was the reality.

Me: Let's just hope our kids are gay.

Watch Dogs Review

Watch Dogs disappointed me. It is not a bad game by any measure, but I allowed myself to get swept up with all of the hype and ended up getting a pretty good game that I was expecting to be legendarily perfect. I've been watching Watch Dogs gameplay videos for months before it's release, and I was certain that it would be a GTA caliber city sandbox, maybe its open world fatigue or the fact that bandanas make my eyes roll, but Watch Dogs feels like another Sleeping Dogs or Saint's Row with a different gimmick.

Watch Dogs does get lots of things right, and unique things at that. The profiling of random people walking down the street is amazing, I'm having a shootout with a security guard who my phone is telling me is HIV positive, or the chick I just got in a fender bender with is a member of a doomsday message board. I steal from citizens' bank accounts, and sometimes use the info I get from the profiler to distract them. I had to sneak past a guarded gate, and my profiler informs me that the gunman's wife just left him. I can then fake a text message to the asshole pretending to be his wife returning, and as he looks down to text her back, I pipe him in the back of the head. The hacking system in Watch Dogs is what the game is built upon, and it works very well. 

The serial killer side missions are also super interesting. Each hidden location contains a gruesome corpse and a disturbing audio recording from the killer. Clearing out gang hideouts and finding weapon crates hidden in garages are fun little distractions, you can also hack into apartment buildings, watching unsuspecting residents through their laptop cameras or television screens. I watching a divorced single dad jerking off until his daughter crying from the other room interrupts him, and I watched in complete anonymity while a business man made an asian hooker play Russian roulette with him. 

The best part of Watch Dogs is inarguably Jordi Chin. Voiced by the super talented Aaron Douglas (Chief from Battlestar Gallactica), Jordi is funny, well-acted and shockingly brutal. He is the best character in the game, and I wish he was the star.

Which brings me to Aiden, Watch Dogs's protagonist. What I liked initially about Aiden is that the game doesn't expect you to develop his powers. Aiden begins his story in Watch Dogs having already mastered hacking, and has long since established his reputation. It is more believable this way, Aiden has been hacking his way around law enforcement for years, so it's no surprise when he has surprising contacts deep within organizations, or when Aiden uses his cellphone to collapse a bridge. The biggest problem is when Clara and Aiden occupy the same screen, which quickly disintegrates into a pile of angsty romantic cliches, topped off with that stupid fucking face bandana.

Watch Dogs does so many unique things correctly that the shortcomings are infuriating. Why can't I move bodies in a stealth mission? The bodies attract attention, so am I not supposed to knock anyone out? If so, why do I have a silencer? Why do I have a stealth takedown? How come Chicago doesn't look like Chicago at all? The Magnificent Mile has been inexplicably renamed The Mad Mile, there's an island in the middle of the city where a secret base is, but the lake is to the east of Chicago, there is no large body of water in the center. The Willis Tower is there, sure, but Wrigley isn't. The Hancock building isn't. The bull statues? The Picassos that line the streets of downtown? The streets aren't actual Chicago street names, and the L trains don't have the names of the real stations. To someone from another place I guess those aren't legitimate complaints, but I'm from Chicago, it is my home and I was super excited to finally play a GTA style game in my city.

The biggest difference between great sandboxes and others are that great open world games make you want to do everything. Recently in GTA5, I did every side quest, every challenge, picked up every collectible. GTAs are almost always a masterpiece, with content so smartly included you can't help but desire to complete it. In Watch Dogs, I do not do the random crime missions, or the convoy missions, or the "tail the target" stealth missions, or the "collect x amount of y" distractions. I don't feel any real incentive to do so, because plainly, Watch Dogs is not as good as some other games of it's genre. Worth playing, not worth 60$

Device 6 Is A Very Smart Game

Device 6 is definitely not what I expected, but that's a good thing. Instead of some spy puzzle game you get an incredibly smart interactive mystery novel. As you read, the game asks you questions, flips the text all sorts of directions and requires seriously difficult brain testers to advance to each new level. The music is creepy, the sound effects can be jolting sometimes, and the story itself isn't half bad. 

The first level of Device 6 does a very good job at preparing you for whats to come. You follow Anna from room to room, as she tries to discover why she awoke in a creepy mansion. One room has a computer that just beeps (I get a Lost vibe from this game sometimes) and another room has a recorded man's voice on an infinite loop. After arriving at a frustrating dead end, you slowly figure out that the man's voice is a clever code, which must be deciphered and applied to the beeping computer to advance. Device 6 is at it's best when it shows you that an object that you originally thought was meaningless actually holds the key to the entire story.

Device 6's thrilling mystery story is very well written, and will have you flipping your iPhone around in a million different directions as you progress. Device 6 feels like a cross between Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright. The game is 3.99, totally worth it even if it doesn't blow your mind and I can at least guarantee that you'll never play anything else like it.

How To Build An Effective Colorless Deck

 The Pokemon National Championships are getting to be a bigger and bigger deal every year. If you browse the message boards you'll see a lot of complaints from participants who just enjoyed getting the shit kicked out of them by players with more expensive decks. Just like Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon card battles can get super frustrating when your talent falls victim to some foil-stuffed EX deck that a rich kid begged his mom to buy him. Playing against a deck that is strong against your chosen type is just as important of a problem, you're stuck struggling through a hopeless 6 kill duel that you can't possibly win. A colorless deck is the answer to both problems, and while players seem to avoid the normals like an uncool plague, colorless decks can be devastating when played with some clever combos. Here are the key pieces to my colorless deck, that is doing really well online.

Bouffalant is the perfect card to stop the bullshit EX cards that rookies throw out all the time. Gold Breaker is a cheap move that deals 120 dmg to any EX card. Also, since EX kills count for double the prize cards, you immediately halt any EX play for the duration of the duel. Boss.

Exploud has the potential to be an unstoppable tank. If you fill your bench with other Pokemon that have the Round ability, (Wigglytuff for instance) you then add 50 dmg multiplied by the number of Pokemon that have it. It's not a difficult task to manage 200+ dmg per turn with Exploud.

Wigglytuff is the perfect eve card because of the price. 3 energy gets you a 60dmg attack also has a possible side effect. Trust me, when sleep hits, and you do 60dmg for a couple turns to a Pokemon that can't hit back, you're hard to beat.

The Aspertia City Gym card adds 20 HP to all colorless Pokemon! The card stays on the field for the entire match, and the look on your opponent's face when you play it is worth every second you hoped to draw it.

Do yourself a favor, and buy some colorless energy. Go on Ebay, and buy a few of them for 3$. When you stock up on trainer cards that let you draw for energy, and you start pulling doubles out, you can win an entire match faster than your opponent can get their deck's gimmick rolling. A colorless deck must behave like the Zerg.

Two weaknesses that my colorless deck has; Fighting-types, and big hitting colorless Pokemon like Kangaskhan and Chansey live or die by the coin flip. Adding a couple Lopunnys will help knock your enemy's Pokemon back and forth from the bench to help stave off any Fighting types or Lucarios that your enemy sends out. At the very least, a colorless deck is an eyebrow raiser and nobody ever beats one according to plan. Every trainer should build one. 

Nocturnal Insanity

I can hear the faucet dripping from my nest on the couch. I stumble into the kitchen, it's 3am, and there isn't a drip after all. I can't sleep. I haven't slept. 

Delirious. The baby must be fed, she demands it. I pour the nursery water, I blink hard trying to force reality to remain. Every light has a tracer.

Legally I'm sober, but mentally I am impaired. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture in some countries, I am positive that I just saw a moving shadow. 

She drinks the bottle and settles in for another 45 minutes of uninterrupted sleep. I cannot however, the cells in my brain fried from using every available protein to maintain a state of alertness.

Sometimes fatherhood is grand, slaying the mighty rent dragon or purchasing new equipment/toys for your party/kids. And sometimes.....it's lord of the flies.

Smaug.

Watch Dogs Has A Couple Problems

I have not finished Watch Dogs yet so this isn't a review, but I want to point out a couple things that are infuriating me. Watch Dogs is a great GTA-style sandbox, but it certainly has issues that make me want snap my controller in half. There's nothing worse than getting invested in a story only to get stuck on a mission due to a programming error and have to rinse and repeat dozens of times. Here are some examples.

You can't move dead bodies. Watch Dogs has stealth sections that encourage and reward those who can complete it without being detected. However, there are also guards who must be eliminated as there is no path around them, and when you drop one, another will find his body and go on full alert. It makes no sense, and seeing how we have been able to move bodies in video games ever since MGS2, there's really no excuse for it.

Waypoints are unreasonably small. You get these contracts, where you must take a valuable car from point A to point B while taking as little damage as possible and before time expires. I made it to my destination with only a couple seconds to spare only to realize that the spot I must come to a complete stop on is the size of a dime. Even though I did what was asked of me, I reached the destination in the time given, I had to do it over, because my back left tire wasn't exactly where the needle-thin waypoint was. Bullshit.

I'm from Chicago, I consider it my home, and that was the biggest selling point for me when Watch Dogs was announced. I've played sandboxes in every city but Chicago, and it's nice that my city finally gets some video game recognition. Only, Watch Dogs's Chicago isn't accurate enough to be immersive. Sure, the cops have the Chi-town accent, the L tracks make me homesick and I got to have a shootout in the lobby of the Willis Tower, but the Mad Mile? What the fuck is the Mad Mile? Is there some legal reason that you can't call it the Magnificent Mile in video games? The Loop kinda looks right, and I guess there is a neighborhood that sorta resembles Pilsen, but all of the street names are wrong, the train stops are incorrect, and downtown Chicago is completely gone. But hey! They got the bean just right!

Best June Ever

June was my first full month as a father of two kids, and (get ready for sappy parent cliches) it was truly wonderful. My son Oliver is at the tail end of 3 1/2, and I'm watching him develop such a unique little personality. Oliver has grown into a very particular kid, with his toys always in a certain order and his bedroom door opened the same exact width every night, every time. However, he has yet to feel any fear or sense of danger, there is he is above, at the Maryland shore looking for sharks to kick. 

"Daddy, are there sharks in this water?"

"Yeah, but they aren't any threat to you, you aren't in any danger."

"Can I see them? Will they get close?"

"I doubt it, they don't really come into shallow water. Why?"

"Because I want to kick one."

We came back from our shore vacation and went to the Camden aquarium, where Oliver got to see two hippos fucking.

I got to ride the frat boy fueled USA soccer craze in a local sports bar that made me feel Iowan for a couple hours.

I did this in Watch Dogs.

And I got to spend a stormy Thursday 3:30am feeding this kid while watching the rain. I have not slept in weeks, my stomach is eroding from the permanent estuary of coffee I have filled it with, and my left eyes twitches. All the time. I feel like Gimli, preparing for a long journey, defending those he loves while trudging through the Dead Marshes. He has to, the fate of Middle Earth depends on him.

Pokemon TCG

Remember a week ago when I begged Nintendo to make a new Pokemon TCG video game? I pleaded to relive the amazing Gameboy Color version of the game, and a very helpful reader emailed me to inform that I was a giant idiot, and Nintendo has had a Pokemon TCG game to download on their website for ages. Turns out that it's pretty fucking awesome. 

It plays exactly like the Magic The Gathering console adaptations. You can zoom in on any card at any time, and since the Pokemon TCG rules are toddlerish compared to games like Magic or Munchkin, it's super easy to follow. Attach energy, use items like a whore, and evolve as often as you can, it's a lot of fun, although I have yet to be legitimately challenged by the AI in the campaign mode.

Luckily there's a decent online match system that will be happy to pit you against a 9 year old who has crafted an invincible deck. A 9 year old who keeps typing "HAHAFAGHAHAFAG!11!11" every time he knocks out one of your Torchics. 

And yes, that is an Emboar versus a Hydregion, kind of a big deal.